World Wise is a think tank that provides an expert compilation of International Development, Sustainability and Foreign Affairs stories that address some of Today's most pressing global issues.

For many in this megacity of 29 million, a desperate jostle for water has become a part of daily life, with people sometimes missing out on work to wait for water that may not come. A recent government think tank report revealed that several major cities in India, including Delhi, could run out of groundwater as soon as 2020.

The world is looking at cities in China and closely observing how their urban transformations are taking place. Three cities, Yinchuan, Chengdu and Hangzhou, have particularly stood out. Their financial models, which are supported by technology and telecom giants, are being replicated across China and watched worldwide.

In November 2019, the people of Quito will start travelling on the city’s first metro line, three years after construction started. The line will be expected to support at least 300,000 trips daily, improving mobility conditions for its more than two million inhabitants.

There have been more than 2,200 fires in the Philippines capital so far this year, mostly in slum areas. One scorching afternoon this month, inhabitants of a slum in the Philippines capital frantically hurled buckets of water to try to save their homes from a raging fire. Six hours later, their efforts proved to no avail. In a country with a yawning wealth gap, the hardest hit are the hundreds of thousands of urban poor who call the shanties home.

After a decade of trial and error, municipal leaders are realizing that smart-city strategies start with people, not technology. “Smartness” is not just about installing digital interfaces in traditional infrastructure or streamlining city operations. It is also about using technology and data purposefully to make better decisions and deliver a better quality of life.

Reports emanating from China indicate that the Chinese Government has moved to apply ‘urban bariatrics’ to its largest cities – Beijing and Shanghai. It seems to have accepted the concept that untrammeled demographic growth of its largest cities is undesirable beyond a point. This unsustainable ‘city obesity’, China believes, needs to be treated by the application of ‘urban bariatric surgery’.

When Amazon opened the bidding for its second headquarters, more than 200 towns and cities in North America jumped at the opportunity to host the online giant and its 50,000 jobs. As some debate the true economic value of such a deal, new research at Harvard's Center for International Development shows it can be vital to help regions transform their economies and diversify into new economic activities.

For some time, there has been an ongoing tussle between the Government of Delhi and the National Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs about increasing fares for Delhi's metro rail system. While this instance is particular to Delhi, the same debate is happening in cities around the world: Who should pay for mass transit?

“Together, India, China and Nigeria will account for 35 per cent of the projected growth of the world’s urban population between 2018 and 2050…It is projected that India will have added 416 million urban dwellers, China 255 million and Nigeria 189 million,” according to UN report on World Urbanisation Prospects.

Pollution issues in India will not go away in a hurry. This is because we have still not started measuring and quantifying pollution. Be it the dirty air, it's toxic water or its sewage filled streets, things are likely to go from bad to worse till some crisis grips the nation. Political indifference and administrative and citizens apathy has ensured that little has been done to reverse the trend in the last decade.

Sidewalk Labs, an “urban innovation” subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet is turning Toronto’s run-down Quayside area into a “platform” for testing how emerging technologies might ameliorate urban problems such as pollution, traffic jams and a lack of affordable housing.